I have my once-a-year cold.  Nothing miserable, just a low grade energy drain, which means I basically have the ambition to drive to work, work, then drive home and more or less fall into to bed.  Motivation for the other things that make life worth living (writing, spending time with The Rib, or wrestling with the cats and dogs) is sadly absent.

Like me, my son Cameron both celebrates and curses our genetics.  We’re cheered that we very rarely fall ill to whatever bug is going around, our joints are sound, and so on.  We grumble that in the DNA dice game of life, we got the “you will start losing your hair in your mid-twenties” snake eyes.

You win some, and you lose some.  (I have my son, so I’ve already won big, but that’s another story…)

In the meantime, I sent a copy of the first part of Book Four of By the Hands of Men to some of my early and devoted fans.

One reader, known as Duke, said this of the section that is titled Ringside at the Circus of the Fallen:  “When I got to the end, a chill went through me.  That, my friend, is damned exquisite writing.”

That was the “cooooool” part of my day.